Teaching is learning.

To truly understand the techniques that you learn in the martial arts, I believe you need to teach them.

Once you’ve trained in a martial arts for a number of years, you may know the techniques. You may be very good at performing them. Your body understands how to make the techniques work. And this is great.

But when you teach the techniques you are forced to think about WHY the techniques works. When you have to explain the technique to someone else, you must think about the mechanics and feeling and distancing and timing.

I believe you can perform a technique very well without truly understanding why it works. But if you teach it you must learn the why, this will automatically force you to explore how to make it better.

After you’ve reached a certain level of proficiency in an art, the next step in your learning is teaching.